In the manufacture of telephone switching and other complicated electrical equipment, extensive use is made of multitudes of relatively small circuit boards that are interconnected and mounted in frames or chassis. The interconnection is often accomplished by a pair of connectors, one of which is mounted or formed along one edge of each circuit board. The second connector has a socket for receiving the first or edge connector and may be provided with a coordinate array of terminal pins projecting from the backside thereof. Wires are run between the various connectors and are secured to the individual terminal pins by wire wrapping or soldering operations to electrically interconnect the circuit paths on the different circuit boards. A connector finding widespread use is one that is constructed by initially mounting a coordinate array of terminal pins in a socket-like base housing, and then assembling a base block with a coordinate array of holes on the terminal pins. This block is subsequently secured to the base housing to lock the terminal pins in the coordinate positions. Following assembly of a base block on the terminal pins, a fiber card retainer with coordinate arrays or holes is assembled on the terminal pins. This retainer is maintained in a position near the projecting ends of the terminal pins to retain the coordinate location of the ends of the pins during subsequent assembling operations.
Heretofore, connectors of this type have been, for the most part, manually assembled; a time consuming, tedious and expensive operation. The present invention is concerned with automatic facilities for aligning the terminal pins in a coordinate array and then assembling one or more members, such as a pin positioning block and a fiber retainer, on the coordinately aligned pins.